Future Ben

Everybody knows that I am still nursing my heartache from Illegal Human Remains Girl, but maybe, just maybe lightning does strike twice. I got tired of online personals, maybe my standards were to high, but nobody seemed all that interesting. Then one day a friend, well more of an aquaintence that I had just met on the street, and by “met” I mean “I was suddenly accosted by,” gave me an interesting suggestion.

I thanked Sausagehead the raving street poet, but I still refused to buy his crudely drawn comic book. When I got home I remembered some of his more intelligible words and looked up www.feralchildren.com My life hasn’t been the same since. Her name is Ro Chom and she is one special lady. I don’t want to say she is a diamond in the rough, but it’s hard to think of any other metaphor. I have never met a girl so independant and free before, and while I am not usually one for petite girls, she is still pretty athletic. She even likes hiking and the outdoors, but she is still up for staying up all night and sleeping all day.

Sure, nobody is perfect. Ro Chom’s attention is elusive and she has been too on the go for relationships in the past. It’s also hard to communicate with her sometimes, but that is probably just because she lives so far away. Also, she occasionally flees back into the jungle. My friends think that trying to keep up a relationship like this is irresponsible, but I don’t care. I’ve got a crush on Jungle Girl!

After reading her profile I sent her a letter. I knew she couldn’t read or write, but I figured somebody would read it to her. I was really surprized that she responded quickly. The mail sure works fast these days. I guess since she had no other way of communicating she sent me this picture.

Wow she cleaned up really nice since they found her! She still isn’t much for clothing though. That could be a problem if she comes to visit before summer.

I know what you are thinking. “futureBen, we’ve read the news and Jungle Girl is not exactly relationship material.” That may be true. At first Jungle Girl was pretty shy. Even her own father was a little put off, but I knew there was potential.

Mr Ksor told the Associated Press news agency: “When I saw her, she was naked and walking in a bending-forward position like a monkey . . . she was bare-bones skinny. She was shaking and picking up grains of rice to eat. Her eyes were red like a tiger’s eyes.”

So maybe she needs to eat a bit more. Lots of girls have a negative self image when they are younger, or maybe it was just her highly active lifestyle. Still, tiger eyes…Mee-ow!

What really sealed the deal was the first letter I got from her.
She is so expressive!

People have suggested she might be a little inexperienced for me, but let’s be clear here. Jungle Girl is 27 and despite being feral she is not exactly untouched by man.

Sketchy reports from the remote area suggest that the woman lived wild and alone for years. But according to another report yesterday she had been with a naked male companion, who was armed with a machete when she was caught. She had marks on her arm from being bound, suggesting that she might have been kidnapped and kept for years as a slave.

I’m no one to judge her lifestyle choice. She would fit right in at Burning Man. Honestly, we have all had are share of crazy relationships, and maybe, just maybe together we can leave behind the heartaches of the past and share something real.

Well that wasn’t so bad. I can’t get back futureben.org yet, but thanks to the find and replace feature of text edit I pretty easily converted the old database to futureben.net. Interestingly enough the only thing that didn’t back up was the look of the site. Another vestige of the past is shed. I feel so clean. Now how do I get my google standing up for futureben.net?

Before I worry about that I am trying to get another site up genosynthesis.org. This one won’t be a blog. There aren’t enough resources for synthetic biology. The point of me doing this isn’t to entertain anybody its a mental focus and it certainly not to be a web designer. I can barely use Wordpress! Futureben is about me. What is the future as I see it? It has been a real help to me. Genosynthesis will be about what I do. Synthesizing genes. I just have to figure out this Joomla thing now.

The existence of my “fucking website” is at risk! Dynamic action must be taken to save the future of futureben! Now I know nobody actually reads any of this, but it’s a blog so I will self referentially blog regardless! The point of this site, other than vanity, is to have some connection to the ideals of communication. Any sane mad scientist holes his or herself up in the lab and lets the layperson wonder what they are up to until the villagers finally come crashing the gates with torch and pitch fork in hand. That’s just not me though. And so, if somebody is wondering exactly where I went awry, here it is as a matter of public record.

So the site is going to migrate to a new home. I would say a new server, but I don’t know how nameservers and such actually work. It could possibly remain on the same server. For all I know they just change some pointers and we’re done. Another thing that may or may not change is the name of the site. The relationship between the current webmaster and me is…not very friendly. I don’t actually own the name of the site so unless an act of non hostility occurs, I will have to come up with a new nickname. How many domain names involving the word “future” could there possibly be?

Hey, facing adversity is human. And triumphing over adversity is heroic, so let’s hope the New Year will bring an even better website than the 15 minute hack job I am currently updating. A note on Wordpress. It is awesome! I do in fact know next to nothing about the series of tubes that make up the internet but I have been able to keep a blog going with minimal effort. I was feeling some anxiety about how to transfer this site but backing up all the files was pretty simple. Really the hard part is going to be setting up Wordpress in the new server space and I think there are about a million people who have done it already. Oh look! You just click a radio button and it installs itself. So easy a biologist could do it. Maybe I can make an actual website next.

Here is to a new year of breaking from the past, finding fresh starts and personal growth. Here’s to the bag of crickets I accidently let loose in the lab just now. Here’s to all of the mice who will sacrifice themselves on the altar of science to help me acheive my vision. Here’s to all of the beautiful and tragic creations that will carry our hearts and minds from the world we know into the terrific and terrifying dreamscape that is forever the future.

Excelsior!

I said we were going to Boston first, but the future starts here in New Yok. This spring will be the groundbreaking of a project to create nearly 1 million square feet of Biotechnology lab space in NY right next to the NYU med center. Apparently they hemmed and hawed about it for years and then Guiliani got cancer and suddenly became very interested in Biomedical sciences. (Funny how that works.) NYU had tried to get the project rolling, but had only managed to get the area rezoned before NYC took the project away from them. Now it looks like it is acutally going to happen.
In addition to providing labspace at rates competitive to Boston, SF and La Lloya, the city is also putting together a sizable investment fund for startups. Hopefully this is the kickstart that NYC needs to catch up to other areas in Biotech. I didn’t plan on staying in New York after grad school, but this might be an opportunity that I should stick around for.

So I am going to Burning Man this year. Part of me thinks it is the wrong thing to do, but that part of me is a wus who needs to shut the hell up. I am going with the most futurey camp out there, Imagenode! I have always had respect for these guys. Great music, awesome technology, and the right mix of art and geek.

Getting the camp ready has been a task. Lots of fundraising parties, lots of carrying things and soldering, soldering and more soldering. Making the sign required the soldering of almost 1500 LEDs and 4500 resistors for voltage regulation.

I have always been more of a biology person, but I have yet to find an easily applicable and robust use if biology in art. While the design and planning of a large scale LED project requires in depth knowledge and experience the actual fabrication techniques can be picked up with a little practice. I have already learned lot from TwinA and Spec, and I pick up more all the time. Inspired, I will try to put together a light sculpture of my own next week. Something a bit smaller scale I think.

Thanks to pink tentacle for posting this Apocalyptic view of Tokyo. Is this what we have to look forward too? Maybe. Does this mean we should bomb Iran, North Korea and Syria. Mmmm I’m not so sure. The first world certainly doesn’t lead by example and sometimes I think the only reason why this hasn’t happened yet is that the apocalypse would be bad for buisness.

Check out the future of gaming. The best aspect of Spore, in my opinion, is that it is an asynchonous MMO. That is to say that the content comes from the user community, but you don’t actually interact with other players. This keeps things fresh but play can be casual.

In my coding class we were talking about web server based programs. First everybody thought that big mainframes were going to do all the work and terminals would be nothing more than a portal for keystrokes and other input.(There was no such thing as a mouse back then.) But then things started to change when Apple released the first PCs. I actually did some consulting for a guy named Daniel Alroy whose claim to fame was an article, written when I was in diapers, about how desktop machines were going to be the next big thing. Indeed that trend has proven true. I can assert that mainframes and supercomputers became marginalized to specialized applications until the internet took hold.

Anyway these trends got me to thinking about how modern games take full advantage of both huge servers and powerfull desktop machines. Games like World of Warcraft and Second Life maintain environments for huge rosters of people. The gamer interacts with that server based world and maxes out the PC’s graphics capabilities in displaying the server based game. Spore is a reflection of that where the server side of the game actually explores the world of content created by the gamer and serves it to other users.

Yep, cyborg sharks. DARPA blah blah blah. Just like that movie blah blah. There, I mentioned the cyborg sharks. Oh yeah. Blah blah Joke about not feeling comfortable swimming in the ocean. Of course, the latest thing is that Homeland Security is replacing the Air Marshals with cyborg Snakes on a Plane!

Do you know what sharks spend their time doing? Looking for food! How long can you get a shark to follow a boat without eating before it gets tired or better yet gets frustrated and learns to ignore the stimulus? Cyborg sharks… Just domesticate sea lions and use them like dogs. Or, better yet, spend the money on public education.